The Future Is History

Summary

A history of post-Soviet Russia told through the entwined lives of four people born around the time of the USSR's collapse, alongside profiles of a sociologist, a psychoanalyst, and a far-right ideologue. Gessen tracks how a brief opening in the 1990s gave way to surveillance, propaganda, and the steady restoration of authoritarian habits under Vladimir Putin. The book diagnoses a society where political possibility was foreclosed before it could mature.